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Daniel Greenfield

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Daniel Greenfield: The Credibility Crisis of America’s Institutions…….

Daniel Greenfield US US Constitution US politics

Daniel Greenfield: The Credibility Crisis of America’s Institutions…….

By KGS4 years agoLeave a comment

The Credibility Crisis of America’s Institutions

And there’s only way one out.

Mon Feb 10, 2020

Daniel Greenfield

The nation’s credibility crisis didn’t arrive overnight. It’s been coming down since the sixties. That was a time when 4 out of 5 Americans believed that they could trust the federal government.

These days it’s more like 1 out of 5.

Congress enjoys the trust of 1 in 10 Americans. The presidency, 4 in 10. (That’s up from 1 in 3 under Obama.) Around the same number trust the Supreme Court.

It’s not just political institutions.

Trust in the media is understandably low with only 1 in 4 trusting newspapers, and less than 1 in 5 trusting television news. Only 1 in 3 trust organized religion and the medical system, even fewer trust public schools, labor unions, banks, the criminal justice system, and big business.

America’s political crisis is really a collapse of trust in institutions. And that’s one thing that Republicans and Democrats agree on. The Republican solution is to restore confidence by decentralizing institutions while the Democrat solution is to restore confidence by expanding government.

When President Trump ran a successful presidential campaign based on a lack of confidence in government, the crisis that most elites and experts had avoided discussing, went national.

The Democrats, who had become the more institutional party, blamed the credibility crisis on FOX News, on fake news on Facebook, and on the Russians. Their proposals for protecting “democracy” from fake news by censoring social media were typical of totalitarian regimes trying to maintain control.

But FOX News was created in 1996. Facebook in 2004. While the latter date roughly coincides with the fall of trust in newspapers and television news from 1 in 3 to 1 in 4, most people didn’t trust the media even before the advent of FOX News or Facebook. Social media and conservative alternatives didn’t kill trust in media. They just piled more dirt on the coffin. There is no turning back the clock to Cronkite.

And there is no clearer way of validating conspiracy theories than by conspiring to suppress them.

Written by KGS

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There’s No Common Cultural Legacy For The Alt-Right

Still, is there something to it? Is there a common heritage that will cover El Greco and Hume and Dostoyevsky? Is there one that can include the Jacobites and the Jacobins? There is, but it is not racial, and white supremacists reject it because it rejects them. The unifying heritage of Europe is religious and philosophical. It is Jerusalem and Athens, in one famous formulation. Christian religion and Greek philosophy, filtered through Roman law and culture, are the foundation of European culture. The tensions, agreements, developments and settlements between these have shaped the Western world, and these roots of Western civilization are not congenial to white supremacy.

Christianity is universal in its message and Jewish in its origins. For centuries after its founding, Christianity’s center was the Mediterranean world, including Asia Minor and North Africa. Christianity has never been defined by race, and locally-grown racist heresies are only sustainable among those ignorant of Christianity’s teachings, origins and history.

Greek philosophy is likewise ill-suited to serve as a basis for white identity. It is either too universal (addressing the human condition in general) or too local—none of us live as citizens of an ancient Greek polis. Later philosophical developments in Europe, such as the philosophies of the Enlightenment, likewise tend to be too universal for white supremacists seeking a tribal identity. As for the scientific revolution that developed within Western culture (albeit with much borrowed from outside Europe), math doesn’t care what color someone is.

War is being waged against Western culture from within which is in essence a war against Christianity and its moral origins in the Hebrew Bible. By attacking these Biblical foundations in the name of reason and human rights, the culture warriors of secularism are sawing off the branch on which they sit. The only way to defend Western civilisation is to reaffirm and restore its Biblical foundations. My argument is a development of ideas I first explored in my 2012 book The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth and Power.

We are living in an era which extols reason, science and human rights. These are said to be essential for progress, a civilised society and the betterment of humanity. Religion is said to be their antithesis, the source instead of superstitious mumbo-jumbo, oppression and backward-thinking.

Some of this hostility is being driven by the perceived threat from Islamic terrorism and the Islamisation of Western culture. However, this animus against religion has far deeper roots and can be traced back to what is considered the birthplace of Western reason, the 18th-century Enlightenment.

Actually, it goes back specifically to the French Enlightenment. In England and Scotland, the Enlightenment developed reason and political liberty within the framework of Biblical belief. In France, by contrast, anti-clericalism morphed into fundamental hostility to Christianity and to religion itself.

“Ecrasez l’infame,” said Voltaire (crush infamy) — the infamy to which he referred being not just the Church but Christianity, which he wanted to replace with the religion of reason, virtue and liberty, “drawn from the bosom of nature”.

Perfecting society

But this Enlightenment did not remove religion so much as pervert it. It took millenarian fantasies, the idea that the perfection of the world was at hand, and it secularised them. Instead of God producing heaven on earth, it would be mankind which would bring that about. Reason would create the perfect society and “progress” was the process by which utopia would be attained.

“I think that we should correct the vocabulary that we use, and call a spade a spade. It is all about Jihad, the Islamic effort to spread Islam globally”:

Terrorist attack – should be called Military Jihad.

Incitement – Media Jihad.

Al-Jazeera – Media Jihad Channel.

Imposing Sharia law – Judicial Jihad or Legislative Jihad.

Boycotting Israel (BDS) – Economic Jihad.

Emigration to EU and US – Emigration Jihad / Hijra Jihad.

Building mosques, Islamic education institutions – Cultural Jihad.

Halal food – Dietary Jihad.

Hijab or Niqab – Clothing Jihad.

Activity of MSA – Academic Jihad.

Activity of CAIR – Political Jihad / Public Jihad.

Collecting money for Islamic “charities” – Financial Jihad.

Political correctness – Submission to Jihad.

J Street, Peace Now, JVP and their likes – Jewish Useful Idiots who Serve Jihad.

Iran deal – Western Support for Nuclear Jihad.